British Government Clarifies the Meaning of Socialism (Again)

As I have written on numerous occasions, socialism (aka “democratic socialism”) is, at its core, beyond all the rhetoric about equality, caring for the weak, people before profits, and so on, a political ideology — not a theory or hypothesis, but an ideology in the Marxist sense — based on one simple notion: the individual human being is property of the State.

Allow me to clarify that: according to socialism, the individual does not, strictly speaking, exist at all, except as a secondary manifestation or emission of the primary reality, that primary reality being the social collective, which is to say the State. This clarification is not hyperbole, it is not snark, and it is not a distortion of meaning. It is a straightforward, literal account of the quasi-metaphysical belief underlying all socialist thinking, namely that the individual precedes the political collective only as the child predates the adult — an immature historical phase on the way to the mature condition that properly defines our species. The completely unified collective, with the government as its lifeblood, is the primary entity. The individual human, though prior in time to the political collective, is posterior in logic, and is therefore of no more theoretical, practical, or moral consequence than any individual cell in an animal’s body.

This is the principle that justifies the socialists’ outright rejection of the concept of private property. Private property, as anything more than the rhetorical illusion we all accept today, is grounded in the principle of self-ownership. The “right to life” and the “right of self-preservation” are nothing but acknowledgments of the idea that a man belongs to himself first, and therefore cannot be denied the natural tendency of a living being to attend to its own survival, in whatever manner is deemed viable. The rejection of property is, in the end, the denial of self-ownership. Socialism is grounded in this denial. In other words, socialism, in denying that the individual has primary existence, necessarily also denies that the individual owns himself.

Who, then, owns him? The answer is obvious.

The British government, eager to prove its merit as a proper socialist state, has made a cottage industry of delineating the conditions of collective ownership of the individual in the starkest possible terms. Last year, their poster child for the principle of the individual as dispensable cell of the socialist collective was named Charlie Gard. This year, heis known as Baby Alfie. In both cases, parents are outright denied the freedom to seek further treatment for a child the State has decided is not worth trying to save. In both cases, the further treatment in question would not cost the British government, in the form of the National Health Service, a penny. In both cases, the Catholic Church has offered to treat the baby in Rome for free. In both cases, the child’s parents — in Alfie’s case, Tom Evans and Kate James — have fought long, sickening court battles against their owners, the British government, only to be denied every time in favor of “the best interests of the child,” i.e., premature death by forced starvation.

And both cases have stirred up a ferocious public debate between those who believe a child belongs primarily to the parents who brought him into the world and are fighting tooth-and-nail to save his life, and those who are only too happy to be property of the collective, and therefore despise anyone who would challenge that status. In other words, the debate is between free men in chains and willing slaves.

As usual in our time, the slaves are winning. That, in a nutshell, is the meaning of democratic socialism.

Yet again, we see the truth of socialized medicine. It is the State’s most effective means of asserting its ownership rights over every individual — effective not only in that it gives the government the power to directly eliminate anyone deemed socially useless, but in that, over time, it creates among the general population a moral submission to the premise that your life depends, and should depend, on the whim of the State. Hence my description of socialism’s non-ruling class supporters as willing slaves. This, too, is not hyperbole, snark, or distortion, but a straightforward literal description.

This case is receiving much less attention outside of Great Britain than the Charlie Gard case, a symptom of our modern malaise — yesterday’s titillating sensation is today’s old news. That is part of the infamous progressive ratchet — issue fatigue. In this case, the issue that has worn us into moral numbness is nothing less than the issue of whether the individual exists. We have, apparently, accepted no for an answer.

I first heard of Alfie Evans’ story on Glenn Beck’s program, where it was the opening topic one day last week. You may hear that segment below: